Independiente

In the winter of 2011, when I found the National Geographic Magazine on the national parks, I may have been searching for some personal wonder. As this dissertation project became more defined over the course of the next several months, I undertook a

19 much larger search for wonder as I worked in archives, drove and hiked through national parks, browsed the web, walked through zoos, examined exhibits, experienced Disney’s theme parks, and watched movies. As is often the case in cultural history projects, neither my material corpus nor my methods of inquiry were entirely pre-set. I knew that the rhetoric of wonder has been pervasive in U.S. cultural contexts since at least the nineteenth century. It has appeared in a wide range of cultural productions—

advertisements, brand names, comics, films, literature, etc. And I knew that it would be impossible to account for all of those instances of wonder—from Wonder Bread to Wonder Woman.

“Worlds of Wonder” focuses on the institutional contexts of national parks, zoos, and Disney, sites, which historically have been considered to be wonders and have been defined by their capacity to invoke wonder. These sites form the basis of a comparative cultural study that takes a broad view, moving from early nineteenth-century travel narratives (by Washington Irving, Alexis de Tocqueville, Frances Trollope, John Charles Frémont, Samuel Bowles, among others) to railroad guidebooks of the American West to recent exhibition practices, advertising campaigns, films, and performances in zoos and amusement parks. I focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of U.S. parks, tracing their relationships to histories of wonder and travel, colonial collections,

conservation, science, and spectacle. The histories and cultural contexts surrounding U.S.

national parks, zoos, and Disney theme parks ground my efforts to draw genealogies of wonder that undergird the ways in which wonder has become a primary emotion and rhetorical framework for thinking about U.S.-American environments.

20 Although important work has been done in writing the history of wonder, Daston and Park’s book, which covers 600 years of material, remains the only long-view

approach to the history of wonder. Daston and Park acknowledge that writing the history of wonder requires suspending traditional periodization (in their case, the distinction between the medieval and early modern periods), but, despite the impressive historical range of their work, their study still leaves intact the linear narrative and periodizations of the Enlightenment and modernity. Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1991), among other posthumanist texts, has done much to problematize traditional modern narratives of history and binaries, including the modern/non-modern distinction. “Worlds of Wonder” takes Latour’s critique as a starting point for a long-view approach to

examining U.S.-American wonder spaces that continue to participate in much older histories of pre-modern or non-modern wonder.

As a means of getting at these genealogies of wonder, I examine the multi-faceted histories and cultural positions of national parks, zoos, and Disney, the print culture that has surrounded them, and the ways in which they have used and been shaped by

discourses of wonder. My central questions in examining these institutions and the histories they participate in are: Why and how have these institutions come to be so defined by wonder? What histories and practices of wonder do they participate in? How is wonder deployed and valued differently in them? What are the implications of the privileging of wonder in national parks, zoos, and Disney, and in environmental thought?

My analysis of these institutions draws on their cultural histories and ties to and interactions with transatlantic cultural processes and philosophic and artistic discourses.

21

“Worlds of Wonder” draws three main genealogies of wonder—one grounded in national parks and histories of wonder in travel literature; another based in zoos and the history of scientific collecting or “cabinets of wonder”; and the third focusing on Disney and the history of wonder and technology. All three institutional histories and genealogies of wonder are implicated in practices of commodification and tourism. And none of these genealogies is entirely distinct from the other, nor is any a straight, linear history.

“Worlds of Wonder” is primarily a cultural analytical and literary project. I have been trained as a literary scholar, and throughout this dissertation, my approach is grounded in readings of cultural documents within particular historical contexts. The comparative elements of the project are twofold. First, I draw together the scholarly conversations in the history of (medieval and early modern) wonder and modern U.S.

cultural history. Second, in analyzing national parks, zoos, and Disney theme parks together, I bring together several different parks and sites of wonder in order to shed light on different uses of wonder discourse and the significant overlaps in how each institution frames U.S.-American environments and crafts visitors’ experiences of landscapes.

The genealogies of “Worlds of Wonder” owe more to Foucault’s genealogical practices than to more narrowly defined, linear historical genealogies. My genealogical approach to wonder shares with Foucault’s work a focus on historically taken-for-granted elements of everyday experience, that—like sexuality, for example—people have tended to take for granted and “feel [is] without history.”⁴⁸ Much like Foucault’s conception of genealogy this project is neither about origins, nor about clearly linear developments and historical trajectories. Rather, it is about excavating a U.S.-American environmental

48 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1980), 139.

22

“structure of feeling.”⁴⁹ Indeed, the project’s genealogical elements follow more of an

“archaeological method,” as Foucault describes this practice in “What Is Critique?” This method for Foucault is about excavating the structures undergirding particular

institutional forms of knowledge and power and the ways in which they have become historically acceptable and therefore naturalized.⁵⁰

Many scholars in the Posthumanities have assumed similar or related methodological approaches to cultural critique, based on examining particular

institutions’ or objects’ historical trajectories and reframing them as multi-dimensional and complex historical processes. Donna Haraway, for instance, describes her own method through the example of analyzing a former student’s diaper pin:

She [the student] was very committed to the home birthing movement and wore diaper pins on her hat as a symbol of natural child-birth. She saw the diaper pin as a non-medical object, an object from daily use that signified women’s

relationships to their babies that was unmediated by the ultrasound machine, the speculum…. So we took the pin back in terms of the history of the plastics

industry, the steel industry, and the history of the progressive regulation of safety.

And pretty soon we saw how the safety pin was immersed in all these state regulatory apparatuses, and the history of the major industries within capital formation and so on. I hadn’t removed it from the context in which she was wearing it, but… [showed] that it has many more meanings and contexts to it and once you’ve noted them you can’t just drop them. You have to register the

‘interference.’ …. [I work] to make visible all those things that have been lost in an object; not in order to make the other meanings disappear, but rather to make it impossible for the bottom line to be one single statement.⁵¹

Haraway’s approach, as it is articulated here, draws at least as much from Marxist and scientific materialisms as it does from Foucault’s genealogical projects. In Foucault’s work, as many critics have noted, history is painted in broad strokes. Unlike Haraway’s

49 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

50 Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?,” in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York:

Semiotext(e), 2007), 61.

51 Donna Haraway, How Like a Leaf (New York: Routledge, 2000), 105.

23 safety pin, but like sexuality, wonder is an abstract concept/emotion that operates in specific, muddied terrains. For this reason, “Worlds of Wonder” is organized around chapters that operate both as comparative contexts and as situated case studies, in the hope of avoiding some the of pit falls of broad-ranging historical projects, like Foucault’s, while homing in on the historical conditions and materialities in which

wonder has become such an important rhetorical and affective environmental paradigm.

The genealogies of wonder and travel, collection, and technology I trace in the following chapters intersect with a range of other histories of wonder. In her 1997 presidential address to the American Historical Association, entitled “Wonder,” Carolyn Walker Bynum presents a critique of the way discussions of wonder “have been

interpreted as moving in a more or less straight line from medieval scholastics to the Enlightenment.”⁵² One of her tactics for remedying this linear account is to point to three different wonder matrices in the Middle Ages, whose trajectories sometimes intersected, even as they operated in very different rhetorical and cultural contexts: “a theological-philosophical understanding of wonder emanating from university intellectuals; a religious discourse about wonder found in sermons, devotional writing, and…saints’

lives; and a literature of entertainment [including travel writing, history writing, etc.].”⁵³ Bynum’s approach to delineating multiple co-existing forms of wonder discourse informs my own approach.

Bynum differentiates between “wonder behavior” and “wonder talk,” and she examines both wonder discourses and “the circumstances under which medieval men and

52 Caroline Walker Bynum, “Wonder” The American Historical Review 102, n. 1 (Feb. 1997), 4.

53 Ibid., 6.

24 women experienced wonder, whether or not the sources use the term.”⁵⁴ “Worlds of Wonder” studies discourses, but it does so through examining the making of geographies and spaces of wonder—wonderscapes, as I call them—be they explicitly named as such or not. In examining national parks, zoos, and Disney, this approach traces histories of wonder that are primarily, though certainly not exclusively, implicated in leisure practices, tourism, and recreation. Until now, the history of wonder has been traced primarily in conjunction with the history of science. Daston and Park’s book aims, indeed, to tell the history of science through affect, rather than institutions. Nadis’s book is also invested in the history of science, but his focus on “wonder shows” does begin to shift the focus to recreational contexts. “Worlds of Wonder” seeks to further prioritize the history of wonder, in its discursive and rhetorical formations, less as a branch of the history of science than as part of histories of emotional environmental experiences and leisure practices.

One of the problems with the notion that wonder operated in a “straight line” from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, as Bynum critiques, rests in the fact that this narrative assumes a particular secularizing trajectory. The supposed “vulgarization” of wonder Daston and Park and Nadis posit rests on a particular understanding of the rise of secular institutional science. But science, like wonder, also has many discursive

incarnations—and wonder has been a major presence in the development of science from the collecting practices of “cabinets of wonder” to the rhetoric and aims of popular science and nature writing well into the present day. Rachel Carson’s The Sense of Wonder (1964) is an example that has been in print for nearly five decades. More

54 Ibid., 3.

25 recently, writers like the physicist Richard Feynman and evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins have also invoked wonder as part of their efforts to make science appreciable to a broader public, in the way that music is appreciable to non-musicians, to use Dawkins’s explanation.⁵⁵. Other works like Colette Brooks’s Lost in Wonder: Imagining Science and Other Mysteries (2010) aim explicitly to bridge institutional science and the general public through wonder.⁵⁶ In narratives like these, wonder inhabits a kind of in-between middle-brow domain between popular culture and the intellectual elite, and it participates in a re-enchantment of the world.

In foregrounding American national parks, zoos, and Disney, “Worlds of

Wonder” locates itself in what might be termed “mainstream” culture, while also tracing genealogies of wonder that traverse these mainstream locations and function in a

multiplicity of histories and genres. Institutions of wonder like national parks and zoos do participate in scientific traditions, cultures, and practices—as places both amateur and professional scientists study and observe nature and animals. However, the prominence of wonder in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. contexts has been equally embedded in the development of American recreational and leisure practices, as well as American corporate capitalism. Wonder articulated and continues to articulate a kind of suspended ontological realm. It is not utilitarian, and although there are objects of wonder, wonder has no aim. As many commentators suggest, wonder is bound up in novelty, and hence, it is markedly temporary. Because of its temporariness, it has to be constantly reinvented to

55 Richard Dawkins, “Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder,” The Richard Dawkins Foundation, April 10, 2006, http://richarddawkins.net/articles/3-science-delusion-and-the-appetite-for-wonder. See also:

Richard Dawkins, The Magic of Reality (Washington, D.C.: Free Press, 2011); Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998); Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (New York: Norton, 1989).

56 Colette Brooks, Lost in Wonder: Imagining Science and Other Mysteries (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010).

26 be sustained, a point, which I focus on specifically in chapter three. My approach to wonder aims to examine rhetorics and experiences that articulate, because of their

“unscientific” quality, a different kind of affective relationship to nature, geography, and technology.

Much of the scholarship in American Studies and environmental history that has sought to define and historicize ideas of nature have focused on the categories of

“pastoral” and “wilderness.” Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964) examines

“the pastoral ideal” as defining “the meaning of America ever since the age of

discovery.”⁵⁷ Marx’s analysis attends to the centrality and persistence of the ideal of “the good shepherd…withdraw[ing] from the great world [to] begin a new life in a fresh, green landscape”⁵⁸ in U.S. literary and political history, even in an “urban, industrial, nuclear-armed society.”⁵⁹ The paradox of a machine-oriented, complex society

maintaining pastoral ideals is Marx’s primary focus. My focus on environmental wonder does not displace Marx’s highlighting of the importance of American pastoral, but wonder’s applicability to both natures and advanced technologies, perhaps offers an American aesthetic and environmental ideal that accounts for the co-existence and complementarity of both untouched natures and advanced technologies.

Not long after The Machine in the Garden was published, Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind sought to foreground a different kind of natural environment—“wilderness.” A foundational work in environmental history, Nash’s book was first published in 1967 on the heels of the 1964 Wilderness Preservation Act, and

57 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., 5.

27 remains one of the most extensive studies of how Americans have thought about the environment.⁶⁰ The Wilderness Preservation Act and scholars working on the history of wilderness sought to create a legal definition of wilderness and outline a federal National Wilderness Preservation System to encompass lands administered by the National Park Service, the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. Under the Wilderness Act, parts of federal lands administered by all four departments are protected in their “wilderness” state, which usually means that no roads or structures may be built on them, and they cannot be used for commercial purposes.

Nash and his colleagues were concerned in large part with establishing the importance of the role of “wilderness” in American history. They foregrounded the centrality of the changing place of the wild in the development of modern American culture, beginning with the quintessential American struggle to “overcome” a hostile landscape. According to Nash, this struggle was one of the main themes of the nineteenth century. Nash’s examination shows how European ideas of “wilderness” crossed the Atlantic and influenced American settlers and explorers. In turn, the American landscape altered European ideas of wilderness.

In the past several decades, scholars have begun to problematize the seemingly uncritical embrace of wilderness,⁶¹ and, in the process, wonder has emerged on the map

60 Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4^th edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). More recent works in this vein include: William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991); Michael Lewis, American Wilderness: A New History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2^nd edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

61 See, especially, William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,”

in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W.

Norton & Company, 1995), 69-90.

28 of environmental history. In “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon, for

example, writes that:

The romantic legacy means that wilderness is more a state of mind than a fact of nature, and the state of mind that today most defines wilderness is wonder. The striking power of the wild is that wonder in the face of it requires no act of will, but forces itself upon us—as an expression of the nonhuman world experienced through the lens of our cultural history—as proof that ours is not the only presence in the universe.⁶²

I will discuss Cronon’s essay in more depth in chapters one and two, but as of yet, there have been no cultural histories of wonder or attempts to analyze the ways in which wonder-discourses have, over the course of at least a century and a half, participated in the gradual institutionalization of U.S.-American environments, particularly in park systems. “Worlds of Wonder” historicizes wonder as a key term in U.S. environmental history in order to begin to draw the contours of its place and function—as a rhetorical discourse and an emotion—in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and early twenty-first-century U.S.-American culture. If, as Cronon notes and I argue, wonder has defined and continues to define understandings of and approaches to nature in the U.S., how is it implicated in contemporary ecological crises?

In all three institutions I study here, wonder is galvanized as a form of respect and reverence for the natural environment, an affect that cultivates care and investment in nature. It is, on the one hand, a form of contemplative aesthetic, but it is also deployed as an affect with the potential to inspire concrete and creative action. In recent and

contemporary cultural institutions, wonder is therefore not just an aesthetic, emotion, and a discourse; it is, as I will argue, galvanized as an environmental ethics and politics—a

62 Ibid., 88.

29 form of national, global, and ecological citizenship—all while also being a commercial tool of the recreational and leisure industries.